The Turing Church of Transcendent Engineering

Speaker 1

And now we’re pleased to welcome from all the way from Budapest our next keynote speaker, Giulio Prisco. Julio is a writer, technology expert, futurist, and transhumanist. A former manager in European Science and Technology Centers, he writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds. space exploration and future studies. He is especially interested in the convergence of science, technology and spirituality. And Julia will be addressing us on the Turing Church of Transcendent Engineering.

Giulio Prisco

Thank you very much. As the first speaker after lunch, I guess I have to wake some of you people up, and I will do my best. I wish to thank especially the organization for giving me a full half an hour. And what I want to say cannot really be said in half an hour. The best I can do is to go very fast through a lot of ideas and to give you some high level impression of what I’m thinking. But well, you have my email address here. If we don’t have really time for any discussion, I would like to invite everyone to send me emails or even better to discuss these ideas on the MTA discussion list.

Giulio Prisco

And I would like to dedicate this presentation to a friend, a very good friend of mine, a very good friend of many other people here. Fred Chamberlain, who is the founder of Alcor. And he is now at Alcor. He is a very good friend of mine. I don’t want to say he was a good friend. I want to say he is a good friend because he has only taken a few decades of leave of absence. I think and I hope he will be back with us. I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to call for one minute of silence in the memory of Fred. Instead, I want to invite everyone to join me in a big applause to Cred Chanderlin. And also you, also you who are watching from home, I want to invite you also to join in our uploads. On the T shirt that Fred is wearing, you see mind uploading is the ultimate out of body experience

Giulio Prisco

I’m going to talk a lot of the time, assuming that everyone has some familiarity with concepts like mind uploading and cryonics and brain preservation. I’m assuming everyone is. But if someone is not familiar with these things, I’d like to ask you to raise your hands. I’ll do my best to give a thirty seconds introduction. I see that this is not the case. So I want to move to mind uploading.

Giulio Prisco

What does mind uploading mean? I already said that everybody knows that. The basic concept is the Turing Church conjecture, which has quite complex mathematical formulation, but it basically means that what one computer can do, another computer can do. Perhaps you cannot do it that fast, perhaps you cannot it doesn’t do it exactly in the same way. But one computer can emulate another. And what we see here is a computer This is a high resolution scan of a human brain. And you can see a lot of components which are familiar from computing, data processing units. and communication channels between different data processing units, the brain operates like a computer. I’m just going to assume that. I’m not going to defend this assumption. And following the Turing Church conjecture, a human mind can be transferred when we have the technology from a biological brain to another computational substrate.

Giulio Prisco

Now when we have the technology, when is that going to be? As a matter of fact, it could be very soon. And this is a screenshot of a talk that Ken Hayward gave a few months ago, where we said what he said that we already have the technology to scan a human brain at the required level of resolution for mind uploading we need a few nanometers of accuracy. And a few nanometers of accuracy in brain readout is what we have now with the technology that we have today Of course, we can do that operationally on a very small section of a brain, but we don’t really have the infrastructure to do that operationally on a large scale. to offer brain readout service in hospitals yet, but given the right investment in infrastructure this technology could come very fast.

Giulio Prisco

And what Ken Hayward say in an interview for the New York Times is we have a cure to that right here. We have it. And we just have to make it more operational than what it is now. That will take some time. It will take a decade at least. Of course, perhaps it will take more.

Giulio Prisco

And Fred Chamberlain knew that we don’t have this option as an operational technology right now So he had to do other things to ensure his own immortality. His uh body is uh crayonically preserved at Alcor. And he dedicated a lot of his time and a lot of his attention to building a mine file. Now, what is a main file? I am visualizing here in the first row a mind file as a sequence of uh pictures but also audio recordings and videos and blogs, all the material that he managed to put online, and he did manage to put a lot of material online, is now stored in sites like CyberWave. org. or Lifenow. com. And by the way, we have Gabriel Rothplatt here, who is representing the FerraSeem organization, which is overseeing all these projects.

Giulio Prisco

A mind file perhaps is not enough. That’s the reason why I’m representing it here as black and white picture. It has to be does it work better like that? It has to be augmented with other data that may come, of course, from the chemical signature in a frozen body. I’m representing here in colour or other information that we may need to complete the mine file of Fred Chamberlain until we can achieve a color signature here And that is going to be an emulation of a Fred, which is going to be good enough to be acceptable by everyone, first of all, of course, himself and his wife Linda. And we all look forward to meeting Fred again. Just go to the FerraSene website. for more information.

Giulio Prisco

Now, mine file is going to be incomplete. I’m with the technology that we have right now, even if I dedicated most of my time to building my own mind file, I would never have the time to store on computer memory all the things that are biologically encoded in my brain to make myself me. And that is a problem, but we don’t have to store it all perhaps.

Giulio Prisco

For example, here you can see one of the first homes that I can remember. I must have been about five years old at that time. And I don’t really remember that much. I don’t have that many visual memories of this home. For example, I know that Somebody took me to the school bus the other side of the road. Even if I cannot remain, but I can go to Google Maps, I can activate Street View And when I’m there, I have a full three dimensional virtual reality recording and a walkthrough of the area that I used to know as a child. And so I don’t need to keep within my mind file a visual record of the environment that I saw around me when I was a kid, because that visual record is already stored in the cloud.

Giulio Prisco

And whatever future artificial intelligence system will have to augment my file with other information to reconstruct myself. The it will be able to find this information in the cloud.

Giulio Prisco

That as far as visual memories are concerned, this is another of the homes where I lived when I was a kid. I lived in many places. We don’t only have visual memories in the cloud, but also other for example. My main language is Italian. That was the main language that I heard when I was five to ten years old. Now suppose I cannot preserve the knowledge of my first language in my mind file. That would be a much of a problem because one’s native language is a central part of his personality, of course. But also that information is available. in the cloud. We have plenty of information about written and spoken Italian language.

Giulio Prisco

So I think future Mindfile revival systems will be able to draft this information onto me as an external subsistence. And I think I’m sure I have given the idea future AI system will be able to fill the gaps in our minefiles with a lot of available data, so that I definitely look forward to the revival of to these minefiles. But I also agree on the fact that this perhaps is not enough as a personality preservation system, as Gabriel said in his article on IET. We really need to have multiple backup strategy, including cryonics presentation, including in the future Chemical brain preservation, and so on. The result will be that something will be able to reconstruct our memories,

Giulio Prisco

And this is one of the reasons why there are some authors who think of transhumanism as a religion. I was not sure of the title I wanted to give to this slide. Perhaps I wanted to say transhumanism is a religion, but perhaps that would be too strong a statement. I think we can safely assume that transhumanism can be interpreted as a religion. and can we can give people a good subset of the mental benefits that religion gives.

Giulio Prisco

This is a very good book. written by a friend of Manhattan College in New York, Robert Jurassi. I hope he’s listening to us now. A defense of the interpretation of transhumanism as a modern religion. As a matter of fact, this is one of the memories I have when I started reading the XRP List in the nineties. The first thing I thought Also, okay, this looks like a religion, and it looks like a very powerful new religion for the new millennium. I wrote that to the extrabelist, and some of the replies that I got where what you can very easily imagine. But I did also get some at least interested replies. And I’m happy to see that even if we are still a very small subset of the transhumanist community, there are more and more people who share our interpretation of transhumanism as something in some sense like a religion.

Giulio Prisco

And I want to talk now of the religion of Richard Dawkins. Now everyone knows who Richard Dawkins is. Everyone knows that Richard Dawkins is the a champion of the new atheists, someone who has been uh sometimes uh very passionately against religion. But what he’s saying here is that it’s highly plausible that in the universe there are godlike for example, alien civilization that had attained superhuman uh power that we, from our perspective, could only call God. Oh my God, that uh looks like exactly the sort of religion that I believe in. This looks like the region that we believe in. He’s even considering the possibility that our reality may be computed

Giulio Prisco

By a higher level reality, well this is what we are saying here in all our talks today. He is assuming that there is nothing supernatural in that. He is thinking that this godlike creators that may exist in the universe and may have computationally created our reality. They must have uh been evolved like us. from biological organisms. And he sees that as just one very advanced stage of Darwinian evolution And I do find I must say that I’m not a member of the church.

Giulio Prisco

Most of you know that. I know just a little bit about the church, but that looks like some of what Joseph Smith wrote. And this is one of the reasons why I was very attracted by the MTA in the first place. By the way, he wrote this in a book called The God Delusion. But perhaps he doesn’t think that it is such a delusion after all.

Giulio Prisco

He’s saying the same thing that Actor Clarke said. But Actor Clarke was not the first, because William Shakespeare was the first to say that there are more things in heaven and earth. that your philosophy contemplates. And another who said similar things in a very nice way is Ray Hurzwell in the age of spiritual machines. when he discussed what’s going to happen of the universe is going to continue to expand, if it’s going to shrink until a big crunch. He thinks that is not writt necessarily written in the laws of physics. but it may be a decision that we ourselves will have to make when the time is right. So he’s considering the possibility that we may evolve to such godlike powers that we will be able to rewrite the laws of physics. And what I say is, why not? I hope so. That will be a very beautiful future to live in. And I hope to be revived in such a future. I’ll try to. I hope you guys from home are listening to me.

Giulio Prisco

Now, I mentioned Fred Chamberlain. I want to mention also another person. This is my mother. She died in 2001, more than ten years ago, and she is not crayonically preserved anywhere. She didn’t leave a minefile behind. She’s just in a cemetery. So what it se it would be very natural to think is that my mother is real dead, dead, dead, dead forever, without any backup. Of course, I don’t like to think that. We also like to think that the people that we loved who died before some very advanced and science fiction like technology that we have today. We like to think that we can see them again.

Giulio Prisco

Living forever is not enough. Immortality is not enough. I really think that science and technology will advance to the point where we will be able to become an immortal species But that is not enough. Why is it not enough? Because I want to see my mother again. Because you want to see again some people that, according to the conventional wisdom, are dead and are gone forever. Religion, in order to be successful, mimetically successful, in order to be strong in order to be something that people can really believe in, must offer resurrection besides immortality, and it must offer it through science and technology. according to my point of view at least.

Giulio Prisco

This is the principle of universal immortalism, to restore to life all persons who have ever lived. Whether they had been preserved or not, I hope to hear from Mike later more about universal immortalism. Nobody said that better than Joseph Smith. If I have no expectation of seeing my father, mother, brothers, sisters and friends again, my heart would burst in a moment, and I should go down to my grave. That’s what we really need religion for. is not the only reason, but I think is the strongest. We cannot bear the heartache of life of knowing that we will never see again the persons that we love. This is what this hope is what anything that wants to call itself a religion must be able to offer us.

Giulio Prisco

And that’s why we’re talking today of transcendent engineering. Say things like we will develop space time engineering and scientific future magic much beyond our current understanding and imagination. And by using this future magic, we will be able to do things like, for example, resurrect the dead by hoping them to the future. This is a part of a short article called Ten Cosmist Conventions that I wrote with Benger Sel a few years ago and wherein his book titled Cosmist Manifesto, and I wish to recommend reading this book to everyone.

Giulio Prisco

And again, the Prophet Joseph Smith said the same things When I was preparing this presentation, I was not sure what citation I wanted to include from Joseph Smith about Theosis, the idea that uh God was once like us, and we may become one day like God. Uh, I’d like to have your opinion where the situation that I have um Inserted here is a good one. If you know of a better one, I’d like to know it. So just get in touch with me. Thank you very much. It’s on the MTA side. There is a very good repository of citations and quotes.

Giulio Prisco

Another philosophy that is very much related to what I am saying to what we are saying here today is Russian cosmism, and this was a Christian transhumanist philosophy originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Now there is a documentary done by the BBC last year. about Russian cosmism and its role as precursor of all the Russian scientific development in the twentieth century and the Russian space programme. In fact, Konstantin Sielovsky, the father of the Russian space program was a cosmist. The documentary is called is called Knocking at Heaven’s Door. It was aired last year. And well, okay, I’m not supposed to say that, but if you are into these things, you can very easily find it on the file sharing sites. And I recommend

Giulio Prisco

To everyone watching this documentary, unity between men and the cosmos, humanity’s destiny to leave the Earth and colonize the universe. And also so technological resurrection, that’s from another Russian cosmist philosopher that I’m going to mention later. These are the cornerstones. of what can be a transhumanist religion. Now I don’t I don’t want to say it like that. These are the cornerstones of our transhumanist religion.

Giulio Prisco

Mind uploading say that we can make a copy of the self, which is biologically encoded in the brain, and we can reimplement it, reinstantiate it something else. we think that future science and technology will also develop some magic technology that now we used to call mind time scanning and sometimes quantum archaeology, to reach back in the past, acquire high resolution information from the past in such a way as to become able to reconstruct Exactly, what’s going on in the biological brain of a person alive now, and reinstantiate this person in the future.

Giulio Prisco

We may wake up in the future, we may wake up in the real reality, or perhaps we may wake up in a virtual reality, perhaps our descendants when they choose to resurrect us, we choose to implement us in one of their virtual worlds. We could be living in a simulated universe right now I cannot demonstrate it, but is a possibility compatible with what we know about science and technology today. We are perhaps already there.

Giulio Prisco

Now, what happens in a simulated universe? This has been described, for example, by Hans Moravec. If you read between the lines of some of the things that Hans Moravec has written you find that he takes this option very seriously, and he thinks that we may be reconstructed in the mind of a superhuman descendant, or we may be living in the mind of a superhuman entity right now And he’s not the first one to say this.

Giulio Prisco

Bishop George Berkeley said that a few centuries ago. We may be thoughts in a transcendent mind, the mind that George Berkeley used to call the supreme and wise spirit in whom we live, move and have our being. That’s George Berkeley’s a God, and we may be thoughts in the mind of God. We’re saying the same things that has been said have been said for centuries. Of course, we are saying them in different words. based on the understanding of scientific reality that we have developed in the twenty first century.

Giulio Prisco

Now we’re talking about simulation. Let’s see a very simple simulated universe. This is the generated by the game of life of John Conway. is an extremely simple universe. Each cell is updated in real time according to the state of the surrounding cells. It’s a very simple cellular automata. In this simulation, I have there is an oscillator here. This thing in the bottom is an oscillator that just does like this. This is a a glider is a structure that in this simulated universe is going to move like this. And what’s going to happen is that at some point this oscillator will die because it will be destroyed by the glider. These are the laws of physics of this very simple simulated universe.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, let’s go back in time. Hold on, go back in time. That’s not possible. And in fact, the laws of physics of the life universe are not reversible in time. I cannot reconstruct the state of the system in the past from the state of the system now. So this is really a miracle. We have an Angels here and he has done a miracle.

Giulio Prisco

These laws of physics are not reversible, but I am running this simulation. This is my own universe. I can keep as many back up as I want. These backups are not done within the physics of the life universe, but I’m doing them in my own level of reality. I have kept all the snapshots that I keep as backup. The simulators may be creating new snapshots of our minds and ourselves right now. So I’m back at the first instance of time. I have flipped a bit. I’ve changed the status of a sale. in a way that is incompatible with these laws of physics. But I can do it because I’m running this simulation. You install a live simulator and you can do it yourself. If you are running a simulated universe with its own simulated physics, you can, from your level of reality, do something that goes against the laws of physics, of your simulated universe

Giulio Prisco

That’s what we call a miracle. In fact, now we have an angel who has done a miracle. And the oscillator is safe. What’s going to happen if I continue to run the simulation is that these Glider will die, and the oscillator will continue to oscillate forever. It will be an immortal oscillator.

Giulio Prisco

This is the concept that I want to insist on. I don’t believe in supernatural. whatever happens happens within the laws of physics. But if our universe is a simulation that is being computed in a higher level of reality Those who are running the simulation, of course, they cannot violate the laws of physics of their reality, but if they choose, they can violate the laws of physics in our reality because our reality is a computed reality from their point of view and they have full control.

Giulio Prisco

This is a I mean, I have said that I don’t believe in supernatural. But now I’m saying that I believe that maybe there is such a thing as supernatural. So I have thrown supernatural out of the main door. Now I have thrown supernatural out of the back door, but now it’s coming back to the main door of science. There are scientific explanations of A supernatural reality, or what we from our limited perspective would call a supernatural reality

Giulio Prisco

Let’s talk of this concept of quantum archaeology, of uh time scanning, to go back in the past and get information from the past. Does everybody understand why I have a a cat here. I have a stone cat. It was in a temple. I don’t really remember where it was, but I thought it was very appropriate. Does everyone understand why we have a cat here? I’m referring to the Schrodinger cat, of course. We are going to talk of the Schrodinger cat. Okay.

Giulio Prisco

What is quantum archaeology? I wanted to give a loose definition. It’s a set of hypothetical far future technology. They may be related to quantum effects because everything is related to quantum effects. And this set of technology will permit reconstructed the past with such a accuracy and resolution to reconstruct human beings by coping them to the future. And the question I’m asking myself is, is this feasible or not? Of course, we cannot do now, but is this something that can be done, can be envisaged, can be imagined by future science and that can be done by future technology? I think yes. And hopeful by nature.

Giulio Prisco

Another very hopeful person was the other Russian cosmist philosopher, Nikolai Fyodorov, whose common task is to resurrect from eternal life every being non-downed by death in time. He envisaged scientific resurrection. Now something that I want to say is that he was a Christian and the Russian Cosmist philosophy I emerge from Russian Orthodox Christianity. which is very similar to what the MTA is doing within the modern religion. Perhaps the LDS doctrine is especially fertile ground for the emergence of transhumanist ideas. But that has happened many times in the past. And I think we have examples within any major religion. Science is not the enemy of religion. On the contrary, science and religion can speed up each other and mutually reinforce each other, and really persuaded of that.

Giulio Prisco

Now how did Nikolai Fyodorov think That we could be reconstructed in the future. He wrote something like, you know, we The laws of physics say that we can follow the evolution of every particle back in time. So it’s just enough to find the atoms that constituted a particular a person. We just have to put all these atoms together again. That sounds very naive. given what we know of how the universe works. That sounds very naive now, but of course Fyodorov was speaking given the science of his time. we have more advanced science, and we can imagine perhaps something better.

Giulio Prisco

And first, we have to ask ourselves the question, is the universe deterministic and reversible? If it is, then we can reconstruct the past. Now as far as the answer to this question is concerned, everyone knows that the answer is yes, and everyone knows that the answer is no. I’m not going into detail, of course, I’m assuming everyone understands. If we don’t take into account thermodynamics, then the laws of non-quantum physics are fully deterministic and reversible in time. So in principle, we could do something like what Fyodorov envisaged. It’s just going to be very difficult from a technological point of view, just going to need a better screwdriver to do that.

Giulio Prisco

That’s what Frank Tiebler thinks in his omega point theory. He thinks that with some techniques that I don’t have the time to describe, and perhaps that is even better because I would not be able to describe nobody would be our descendants in the far future may be able to reconstruct and inject in their reality, or in a simulated reality, every person who ever lived. I’m not going to read all the all data and I have many articles on my website about the Omega Point. After that, we may wake up in a singularity environment with many of the features assigned to the afterlife world by the major religions.

Giulio Prisco

How can we do quantum archaeology in practice? Now we talk of extra dimensional connection between every point in space time to every other point in space time. If this point in space-time has multiple connections to this point in spacetime in another place and another time. If every space-time pixel is somehow connected to every other space-time pixel, then we may become able to extract enough information from any location in space-time. to do quantum archaeology and reconstruct every person who ever lived.

Giulio Prisco

And perhaps that has to do with quantum physics Well, since everything has something to do with quantum physics, I would be surprised if quantum archaeology did not have anything to do with quantum physics. That’s why we call it quantum archaeology. Can I explain quantum archaeology? No.

Giulio Prisco

Richard Feynman said something very right more than fifty years ago. Nobody understands quantum mechanics. Nobody understood quantum mechanics fifty years ago. How many people understand quantum magnetics today? How many people in the audience understand quantum magnetics? I don’t. I think nobody understands quantum magnetics now.

Giulio Prisco

What the blip do we know? I think many people have seen this film. which is very much criticized as a very low level explanation of quantum physics mixed with so many other things, param psychology and holistic theories. But I’m telling you, I am a physicist. I have uh watched Waldo Blip. The explanation of the physics is good. The correlation with other things are perhaps more Questionable, but the physics in what the blip is good. This is their picture of the Double Slid experiment.

Giulio Prisco

What do these experiments say? That There are no things. Here I have a coin, but in reality it’s not a coin. I perceive this as a coin. It’s a superposition of many things that I cannot even imagine. is a superposition of all these things that I’m representing as dots on the screen. There are no things And no things exist in a superposition of possible states. This is what quantum physics says.

Giulio Prisco

Now what happens when we look at things? When we look at things, we make many potential realities disappear but one, and reality crystallizes and collapses from being a nothing to being what we call a thing. This is one possible interpretation of what the equations of quantum physics say.

Giulio Prisco

Of course, who is the observer? This guy comes from the fringe series. But does is the observer always a human being? Is a mouse an observer? Is a computer an admissible observer? I think the answer to these questions is yes, but not everyone agrees.

Giulio Prisco

And the example of the Schrodinger He is very usually given to show the wordness of quantum indetermination when it becomes amplified to macroscopic level through a suitable experimental setup. If we lock the gate in a box with a radioactive atom that has fifty percent probability of decaying. triggering a device that will uh destroy the cat. Then all that we can say before opening the box is that the cat is doesn’t look like a cat because it’s a superposition of a dead cat and an alive cat. Of course, I’m oversimplifying, but I believe most of the people of the audience know these things very well. The cat is in a superpositional state.

Giulio Prisco

So what happens when someone opens the box? According to the well known Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, the very act of Looking by an observer causes the collapse of the wave function. So while before the observation, the state of the system was a superposition of a dead cat and an alive cat, the observer has collapsed the way it functions, and the state of the system becomes a leader a cat alive or a cat dead. And this means that information is lost. And the universe is not deterministic. Nobody knows what we will see when we open the box.

Giulio Prisco

So it may seem that quantum physics does not have the nice features of classical physics It is not deterministic and it is not reversible. We cannot recalculate the universe back in time, and we cannot do anything like quantum archaeology. There are other interpretations of quantum physics.

Giulio Prisco

In what is called Everett’s many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, there is no collapse of the wave function and there is no irretrievable and irreversible loss of information, what happens when quantum reality unfolds is that the universe splits. It splits in many universes. In one of these universes, the cat is dead and the observer will remember having seen the cat dead. In another universe The cat will be alive and the observer will also remember having seen the cat alive. Universes split and the observers split as well. It’s something weird that we cannot imagine.

Giulio Prisco

And of course, the many word interpretation is called interpretation because there is no experimental way. To demonstrate it is just one of the many possible ways in which we can interpret the quantum physics. Of course, I cannot demonstrate that the Mwi is a true, but I can

Giulio Prisco

consider it as something that may well be the case by thinking about reversible computing. It is a discovery of modern emerging science called physics of computation. that an efficient computer is a reversible computer. The act of destroying information requires an expenditure of energy that has to come from somewhere. So the most efficient computation are reversible computation And it can be demonstrated that every irreversible computation can be embedded in a reversible computation

Giulio Prisco

like the simple logic gate here, is an endgate which is embedded in something which is completely reversible called the tofoligate. Any irreversible computation may be transformed into a reversible one by embedding it into a larger computation where no information is lost.

Giulio Prisco

Now let’s think of some high level a principle. It is not a very standard way of doing science. Because I’m beginning from a very, very high level, and I’m going down to a low level to say something about how the universe works.

Giulio Prisco

A useful high level principle, for example, is that the universe is the fastest computers is the fastest computer that computes itself. If I want to know the weather that we will have here tomorrow with very high accuracy, we can I cannot do that in less than twenty four hours. See, the fastest way to compute the future is to wait for the future to unfold.

Giulio Prisco

I think this is a very good principle because it kind of provides a justification of free will within a deterministic universe. If the universe is deterministic, many people say, okay, I don’t like that because it means I don’t have free will. But if there is no way that you can forecast what you will do tomorrow, faster than waiting and seeing what you will do tomorrow than I think in some sense of the word, we do have free will.

Giulio Prisco

And it can be also seen as related to the problem of evil. Why does God permit the existence of evil. Well, if God has to act within the laws of physics, and if the laws of physics do not permit to know within arbitrary detail, the future in advance, then God Himself cannot know. And He has to allow the existence of evil because there is nothing else that He can do. This is an example of application of a high-level principle.

Giulio Prisco

And applying this other high-level principle that reality must be optimally energy efficient. Then we can conclude that our universe must be embedded into a reversible computation. And this reversible computation can be the multiverse of average many word interpretation. What does that all mean?

Giulio Prisco

It means that reality is more complex than we see. We see a reality with a cat We see the shrouding a cat here, but what we see is a shadow, and perhaps the source of the shadow is not a cat. Looks more like a dog to me. Can be something even stranger than that. So we

Giulio Prisco

Could be multipersons ourselves. And this concept has also been mentioned, I believe, by Chris in one of the morning’s presentation, some kind of multi-dimensional concept of self. We may be shadows of something else that exists in a higher level of reality, and we may be projecting shadows here. But the source of the shadow is something else.

Giulio Prisco

Now what I like to think is that assume that I am a shadow of something else. Now it makes sense to think that the source of the shadow must be much more complex than the shadow itself. I am very complex because I’m thinking if the source of the shadow which is me has to be more complex than me, it means that it must be a conscious being. So perhaps we are lower dimensional shadows of higher dimensional conscious beings were thinking some kind of thoughts, but their thoughts would be much more complex than whatever we can think. I don’t have time to go in detail.

Giulio Prisco

There is an article that I wrote with together with writer Richard Miller. Hello, Richard, if you are listening to us. He’s on my website. It’s called Shadows and the Concept of Self. Now how can we really use all these things?

Giulio Prisco

I’m sure you have all heard of quantum entanglement. If two particles have interacted, perhaps they have a common origin, then you move one here to earth and you place one somewhere else, what happens? common sense says that they are two completely different and two completely separated things with no possibility of interact. But quantum physics implies that there is some kind of instant correlation between any set of particles that have interacted in the past, even if they are out of each other light comes. even if there is no way that one particle can send a signal to the other at lower than the speed of life the speed of light. There are some instantaneous correlation that can be experimentally verified. And actually, this has been experimentally verified since nineteen eighty two.

Giulio Prisco

And this is the example that I like to give. It’s like having major coins. Here is one. It is a magic coin. I give another magic coin to my friend. I stay here on Earth. My friend goes to Jupiter. And the magic coins work like that. When we flip the coin, we get correlated results. head and tail or head and head. But we always get correlated results.

Giulio Prisco

And that’s what that’s not only what the mathematics of the quantum mechanics say it will happen. It is also what it has been experimentally verified. It happens, and it always happens. Entanglement is that completely spoiled the effect that the antiquity has. Let me do that again because it’s important. Okay, now it works. there are instantaneous correlation between things at very separate locations in space.

Giulio Prisco

And as a matter of fact, quantum entanglement has been also theoretically justified very recently, twenty eleven, that it can be happen also in time. Now I have to say that there is no way that we can see to use this instantaneous quantum entanglement correlation to actually send a message from here to there. And why? Because the flip of the flip of the coin is random. It’s not something that I can control. And as quantum mechanics says, if I control it, then I lose all the quantum effects, including entangling it itself. But the correlations are there. The correlations are there. This can be theoretically and experimentally verified. So what happens is that we can have identical random streams at different locations in space-time.

Giulio Prisco

It doesn’t mean that I can send a message from here to there. One of these space time pixels may be here in Salt Lake City on april sixth, twenty twelve, and the other can be on another galaxy in another moment of time. without any possibility to send a signal according to the laws of physics at less than the speed of light. The correlations are there, so we can have identical random streams at different locations in space time.

Giulio Prisco

But it’s a that is exactly what we need to run two identical computation at two separate locations without any need of sending a signal from one location to the other. But what I think it makes sense as a possibility is that having identical random strings could be enough to reconstruct something that has happened in another place and another time. That’s nothing like a rigorous demonstration, of course, but I think quantum physics gives us suggesting evidence for all that. And for the idea that we had flatlands, we live in a lower dimensional world.

Giulio Prisco

How long time do I have? One minute or two, three. Oh, that’s more than I am. Okay, we’re flatlanders.

Giulio Prisco

This is uh I am this guy here. I live in a flatland. I live in a two-dimensional universe. From my point of view, this two dimensional universe is reality. But what this guy is telling me is look, my friend, okay, you are happy with your reality

Giulio Prisco

but there is so much of the real reality, there is so much of my reality that you do not see. This is what modern science is telling us. We don’t know enough to describe what lies beyond our reality. But as the students of modern physics, we know that the the reality that we can Perceive is just a very small subset of a much bigger reality. And of course, that’s again what William Shakespeare said. There are more things in heaven and earth that we can even imagine at this stage of our evolution.

Giulio Prisco

Sometimes we or someone else may develop the science and the technology to go out of flat land. and see the wider universe that is out there. A hand may lift us from flat land into a higher level reality. And the question that I ask myself is whose hand is this? Who is this guy? Who is this guy?

Giulio Prisco

Whenever I give this kind of talk, somebody asks me whether I believe. and used to give very how to say it, very intellectual answers. I know that may be different over here, but a European intellectual cannot say I believe in God. It’s not allowed. It has to say it has to say perhaps it can, but has to use many more words. Well, I guess I do, but however, okay, and I continue talking for half an hour. I cannot answer with just one word. That means the answer is very complex and if you expect a simple answer, that means you’re not smart enough to understand the complex answers.

Giulio Prisco

I gave a talk a few months ago and a lady Ask me, do you believe the answer I gave at that time is well, the answer is more yes than no. That perhaps is a step in the right direction.

Giulio Prisco

I am a scientist and I subscribe to a materials worldview. And as a matter of fact, I am a scientist. And I do subscribe to a materialist worldview. I don’t think anything is supernatural. I think it’s a contradiction in terms. Why? Because if we describe nature as everything that exists, then of course something that is not a part of nature cannot exist. is logic, it’s not science. It’s just how we use language. And in fact, I am a scientist and I subscribe to a materialist worldview.

Giulio Prisco

At the same time, at the same time I have just given you this talk. It’s very evident that I do believe in something, and it’s very evident that we here in this hall, and I hope many of the people watching us have a shared belief in something. Perhaps it’s not the same thing for everyone, but we do believe in something. So I think I’m going to give a much simpler answer next time Somebody asks me whether I believe. I think my simple answer is going to be yes, I do. Thank you very much. Time for any questions?

Speaker 3

When you were talking about the resurrection and the quantum archaeology of a means of finding or even before that, finding past loved ones to bring back and that’s how we’ll eventually resurrect everyone. What are you ascribing to that that in the future I mean for people that it’s very, very difficult to get data on, people who lived many, many thousands of years ago and barely left a trace so that we can record with our current technology. What will be the driver for finding them? Will it be the series of loved ones wanting their fathers and their fathers and their fathers? Or what will be that human motivator to keep finding these people and bringing them back?

Giulio Prisco

Right. Thank you very much. So the question is, why should our descendants bother to resurrect us? I believe that’s the ghist of what you mean. And I think there are many possible answers.

Giulio Prisco

For example, Frank Tiepler says that at some point before the omega point, the amount of computing power which is will be available to our descendants will diverge to infinity. So at some point, it will be so easy for them to resurrect us that they will do it as they will do a very minor routine thing. They don’t even need a justification to resurrect tasks. They may do it just for fun because it’s very easy to do. That’s the answer of Frank Tiebler.

Giulio Prisco

Now I don’t think that we will have to wait until the very end of the universe and until the availability of infinite computing power for technological reservation. I think that might be achieved by some future technology much before that time. So it’s not going to be extremely easy for them, and they will need some reason to resurrect people in the past. But I think the reason that you mentioned is a very good one. I mean, I resurrect my parents because I love them and I want to see them again. Now once they have been resurrected, of course, they want to resurrect their parents because they love them. So the reason to resurrect people from the past is very simple, is love. No other questions, I guess. However, I think everyone has my email address, and I look forward very much to continuing the discussion on the MTA mailing list.